short stories Archives - Annie Bellet

Posts Tagged ‘short stories’

Upcoming in 2013

I’ve been pretty busy lately finishing up some projects and doing some stuff for projects I can’t talk about yet, but I figured I’d update and let people see a preview of what is coming in the next three months from myself and Doomed Muse Press.

First up, I’m just finishing the first full-length Gryphonpike Chronicles novel. It’s got rogues, dragons, ship battles, and general adventuring awesomeness. Here’s the cover:

After that I’m turning my focus to short fiction and novellas for a couple months since I have three short story collections almost ready to go.

The first is a general science fiction and fantasy collection in the same vein as my previous collection “Till Human Voices Wake Us”. It will have about 10 short stories and novelettes as well as one or two novellas. Here’s the cover for it:

The second collection will be of my urban fantasy short fiction, including a brand new Remy Pigeon story as well as a brand new novella. Here is the cover for that:

And finally the third collection will be an adventure fantasy collection featuring six short stories, two novelettes, and a brand new novella (or maybe two if I get carried away, I have two I really want to write and include so it will depend on time). Here is the cover for the adventure fantasy collection:

So expect those out before Christmas! I’ll post when they are available with full descriptions and links where you can find them. Now, back to the word mines.

Award Eligible Fiction

It’s January, so I guess that means it is time to put up a nice handy list of award-eligible fiction. I have a bunch of fiction eligible in various categories for the Hugos plus I am in my second and final year of Campbell Award eligibility. So here’s a list of things and the categories they are eligible for. If you are interested in reading something for award consideration and you would like a free copy, please email me at anniembellet AT gmail DOT com or you will also find that most of my stuff is available free or inexpensively as ebooks on the web (or in paperback in the case of my novel).

Hugo Award Eligible things:

Novel Category:

Fantasy novel, published in March 2011. Click picture to go to Amazon page for details (or check out my “read my fiction” page in the sidebar).

Novelette Category:

The Light of the Earth As Seen From Tartarus– Hard near-future SF novelette published January 2011

Delivering Yaehala– Otherworld Fantasy novelette published December 2011

Crawlies– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

Short Story Category:

Pele’s Bee-Keeper– SF short story, published in the collection Deep Black Beyond, September 2011

I, Vermin– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

The Spacer’s Blade– SF short story, published in the collection The Spacer’s Blade & Other Stories, January 2011

The Scent of Sunlight and River Daughter and La Última Esperanza and Roping the Mother– from the fantasy short story collection River Daughter and Other Stories, October 2011 (all four stories in this collection are eligible)

Flashover (A Remy Pigeon Story)– Paranormal Mystery, December 2011

Of Bone and Steel and Other Soft Materials– SF story published in Mirror Shards: Volume One, August 2011

Nevermind the Bollocks– SF story published in Digital Science Fiction Issue #2, July 2011

Broken Moon– Fantasy story published in the collection Gifts in Sand and Water, May 2011

Lists– Fantasy flash fiction published in Daily Science Fiction, December 2011

Love at the Corner of Time and Space– SF flash fiction published in Daily Science Fiction, June 2011

That’s all of it, I think. Enjoy!

New E-books Published

In the last week or so I’ve put up three new e-books, so I figured they should get their own post.

The first is a fantasy novelette. It has unicorns, chase scenes, friendship, betrayal, and did I mention the unicorns?

Description:

Exiled from her people, Alila lives alone in a canyon harvesting Frankincense resin with her twin unicorns for company. When a pregnant princess on the run from assassins disrupts her quiet world, Alila chooses to help her reach the coast. Hounded by assassins and torn apart by distrust, Alila’s choice threatens to reveal her dark past and her terrible secret. If she and the princess survive their journey to safety.

Buy for Kindle (Or get it free via Kindle Prime Lending).

The other two stories I’ve put up are both ones that appeared in anthologies this summer.

Description:

Eking out an existence as a scavenger in post-apocalyptic Russia, Ryska never thought she would be more than a blind, discarded military experiment. Then she ends up in the middle of a kidnapping gone wrong and must use her all her skills to save herself, and the young boy who brings back painful memories of her past.

This is a science fiction short story that originally appeared in Mirror Shards: Volume One. Get it for your Kindle, or Nook, or in Other E-book Formats.

Description:

Diarmuid long ago gave up hope of escaping his indentured servitude on the Family’s large drug-refining space station. He owed money he didn’t have, they made him an offer, and he loved breathing so he couldn’t refuse. But when he accidentally uncovers a spy from a rival crime syndicate, everything changes. Suddenly escape looks possible and with a crazy sexbot and a paranoid Siberian on his side, what could possibly go wrong?

Nevermind the Bollocks is a short story originally published in Digital Science Fiction #2.

Get it now for your Kindle, or Nook, or in Other E-book Formats.

Hope everyone had a wonderful Holidays. I’ll be doing my “looking back at 2011” post here soon.

New Collection and Also Music for Writing

First, the business stuffs or whatever.

I have a new fantasy short story collection out. Here are the shiny details:

A pregnant witch must decide between protecting her heritage and protecting her unborn child… A man looking for a better life learns there is a permanent price attached to change… Grieving for his lost brother, a man faces the mother of all tornadoes with a little magical assistance… When a social worker threatens to break apart her family, a single mother of two must use all her imagination and courage to escape to a better world.

This is a collection of four fantasy short stories from Annie Bellet. Included are: River Daughter, La Última Esperanza, Roping the Mother, The Scent of Sunlight.

*Bonus Material*
The first five chapters of “A Heart in Sun and Shadow”, a fantasy novel set in a re-imagined ancient Wales.

You can buy it for Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/River-Daughter-Other-Stories-ebook/dp/B005SM8372/

And in all other formats via Smashwords here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93998

Now, on to what I want to talk about in this post.

Music. Specifically, the music I use when writing. I’m always curious about what other people listen to while writing (or don’t listen to) but I am not sure I’ve shared some of my favorites.

It often depends on what I’m writing, but generally, I can’t write without music. I gotta have it. I prefer music without English or Spanish words (or at least pretty incomprehensible lyrics if they are in a language I understand). But instead of just waxing on forever about this band or that song or whatever, I figured I’d just post some links so you can listen to things yourself.

For writing SF, lately I’ve been totally hooked on the Halo 3: ODST soundtrack. Listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go write something full of spaceships and brave people and guns and stuff:

I’ve also been listening to the Bastion game soundtrack a ton. You can get the soundtrack (or listen to it) here: http://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/

For writing fantasy, especially epic-feeling fantasy, Two Steps from Hell is pretty much the winner. Listen to this and then go write a giant sword fight or sweeping reunion among long-lost companions:

In general, I’ve been enamored of the Red Sparowes lately:

And for writing romances or fantasy or pretty much anything highly emotional scenes, you can’t go wrong with anime soundtracks. I really love the work of Yoko Kanno:

So that’s the story with me and writing music. The right song while writing a scene can help me tap into the emotional core I’m looking for or help me visualize the story I’m telling. I don’t know how people write without music. It works for some. Just not for me.

By the way, I’m always on the lookout for more writing music. So if anyone has suggestions of things I might not have heard of, don’t be afraid to post some links in the comments.

New Short Story Collection

I released another short story collection as an ebook. This one is all science fiction and all the stories deal with space travel or distant planets in some way. It includes my other Clarion application story, “Pele’s Bee-keeper”, which also was a semi-finalist in the Writers of the Future contest. “No Spaceships Go” appeared in December on Daily Science Fiction and will be reprinted in the third issue of Scapezine: the magazine of Young Adult SF.

Here’s the cover:

Here’s the blurb:

A shuttle crash and a rescue by a mysterious woman alone on a deserted planet leads to political and physical dangers… A captain facing court-martial discovers an alien in hyperspace… In the not so far future, a teenage boy has to choose between love and traveling to the stars… On a far away planet, one old miner finds something beneath the ice that forces him to face his grief… Two brothers offered a second chance at their dreams of manned space exploration face technological and personal dangers that could cost them far more than just their program…

This collection of both new and previously published science fiction contains four short stories and a novella. Included are “Pele’s Bee-keeper”, “The Memory of Bone”, “No Spaceships Go”, “Beneath the Ice and Still”, and “The Light of the Earth as Seen from Tartarus”.

Here’s where you can buy it: For Kindle, For Nook, All Formats.

Tomorrow- another chapter of Casimir Hypogean!

Two Sales and an Interview

It’s nice to have good news for once coming in multiples. Most of the neo-pro writing life is being told no in varying ways, over and over and over. It’s good to hear a yes on occasion. It’s even better in pairs *grin*

So. A couple sales to announce. First is a reprint sale of my story “No Spaceships Go” (originally appeared in Daily SF in Dec 2010). The wonderful people at Scape– The e-zine of YA speculative fiction loved it so much they want it even though they don’t normally do reprinted fiction. So soon it will be available there as well.

Second sale is an as-yet-untitled story for the anthology Mirror Shards: Exploring the Edges of Augmented Reality (Volume One) being edited by my writer friend Tom Carpenter at Black Moon Books. The anthology is open to submissions until July, so get on it if you have an augmented reality story idea.

And finally, another interview for my indie-publishing side (I’m like the Hybrid Author of Doom here I guess) is up on Indie Reads. You can find the interview here.

Whew. Now back to the grind.

Sale Sale Sale Sale (again!)

Yeah, I know. But I sell sporadically enough that any sale is worth a giant announcement, damnit. Because it’s been almost 6 months since my last sale to a magazine, so I was starting to tell myself it had all been a fluke etc…

Anyway, I sold a flash fiction story titled “Love at the Corner of Time and Space” to Daily Science Fiction. Which marks my fourth short story sale to a magazine and my second pro-rate sale. W00t!

On another note, I’ve written 3 pieces of flash fiction in my adult life, and sold 2 out of the 3. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something…

Nom Nom Nom

Technically, I have a couple stories eligible for award nominations. I had a long debate with myself about even writing this post, but decided, hey, first year I’ve got things eligible, I should at least write a subtle “zomg sold stuffz!” post pointing this out.

So here goes…subtle. Yeah.

“Some Like it Hot” (AlienSkin Feb/March 2010 issue) is eligible as a short story.
“No Spaceships Go” (Daily Science Fiction, Dec. 17th, 2010) is also eligible as a short story.

So if you for some reason loved either of those and are in a position to do some nom-ing, there you go. That’s my list. (My third story published this year doesn’t, I think anyway, fall into the speculative fiction category enough to be relevant. However, if you feel like reading it and don’t mind dropping .99 on it, it is now available as an ebook with another short story here or for free on Contrary’s website here)

Cleanup Week

Novel editing is done. Novel bits are mailed and emailed off to appropriate places for the workshop. Now to get the rest of the stuff done this week that should get done.

I have two stories I need to mail off. I’m discouraged in that I’m fairly sure I’ve sent them to the most ideal markets for each, which means now I start sort of shooting in the dark. One of the stories is pretty much hard sci/fi, in that there is nothing in it which isn’t utterly possible in the near future. But it’s a love story, not a traditional hard sci/fi story. So I’m not sure if the harder sci/fi markets are right for it. Never know til I try I guess, right?

The other story is sort of fable/fairytale-esque and has gotten some really nice rejections, but now I’m low on markets for it. It has eight rejections, which isn’t enough for me to trunk it, but the next two most likely markets for it have other things subbed to them already. So I think maybe I’ll sit on this one, much as I hate to, and wait for one of those markets to open back up again. Or I could send it off to a major long-shot. Hmm.

I have four short stories and a novella to finish, hopefully this week. Then, next week, I start “Sindra’s Storm”. For real. Outline or no outline. Who knows? Maybe one will miraculously come to me this weekend to be written down hurriedly on hotel stationery. If not, well, I have enough to get started. I know the general plot and have the shape of the first few chapters. I even have villain motivation and all that good stuff. It might be that I just have to sit back and let the book write itself, so to speak. Not something my control freak brains are good at doing. Normally I have to be inside everything, figuring out what is going on and what is going to happen next, and I prefer to work from an outline that tells me where the story is going (even if I generally end up revising this outline four or five times while writing). This time, maybe not. I’ll know in a week.

I’m setting a totally arbitrary deadline for finishing the rough draft of this novel as March 26th. Eight weeks. 110,000 words. About 2,000 words a day. This’ll be fun!

Crazy Short Story Plans

Still no word on my WotF third quarter entry.

Which means I really need to distract myself. I’m between novels at the moment, so the best way to keep up my writing habits is to work on short stories. I’ve got 9 out on the market right now. I need more. I want to saturate the market with my work, plus starting in January I’ll be super busy trying to write an entire trilogy in six months while querying about my current novel. And I have three workshops to apply to, all of which want slightly different word counts etc…

Inspired by Jim C. Hines post, I’ve decided to push some stories at more anthologies. Writing to a specific theme isn’t really something I’ve done before. Even with the Shine anthology, which I was very nicely rejected from recently, I wrote a story that I’d been wanting to write and thought it might fit (it didn’t, which once it was written I knew it was a long shot). So I think it would be an interesting challenge to myself as a writer to write for some anthologies.

I went through ralan.com’s anthology calls and made a list of all the ones that interested me and pay at least 1 cent per word. I have a notebook now full of deadlines, requirements, and submission information for each. I’ve picked out about eleven, most with deadlines around early next year, though a couple have deadlines coming up very soon.

I read somewhere, and I honestly can’t recall where though I think it was linked to off of sfsignal.com in a post there, that when writing for anthologies, you don’t want to write the first idea that comes into your head because that will be the one that everyone else thinks of also. I believe the advice said to pick the 17th idea. So I’m currently brainstorming all sorts of ideas, and trying to aim for a good blend of crazy enough that it might not have fifty clones in the slush but still something I’d want to write.

This decision to write for anthologies as well as working on the giant list of ideas I already had is timely. November is coming, traditionally National Novel Writing Month. I’ve done nanowrimo twice and “won” both times. However, I think that my last nano will be my last nano. I learned I could write at length and on deadline. Nano (not that I want to start a war if you disagree with me here…), but you don’t get a novel out of it. Well, maybe if you’re writing middle-grade, because then 50k words might work. But 50k is too short for what I want to be doing. And while I imagine I could write 100k in a month, I think, for myself at least, I’ve learned what I could and it’s time to move and do novels my way (you know, a novel in two to three months instead…).

But don’t think I’m not going to be silly crazy in November. Oh no, I’m going to invent my own tradition. NaShoWriMo. National Short-story Writing Month. My goal is to write a short story a day. Yes, everyday. I’m not limiting the length, though I’d dearly like to write at least a couple decent ones under 4k words to make my life easier come Clarion sub season, but I am holding the minimum to 1,000 words. I figure if I even get six stories worth cleaning up and submitting at the end, I’m ahead for a while. And it will be fun, a chance to experiment and get some random ideas out. I’m planning on using the anthology calls as fodder. I can write the 5th, 14th, and 20th ideas I have for any given theme and then pick the one I want to send. Sounds like crazy fun right? Right?

So, my goals for October are to write up the novella formerly known as Werewolves in Space (which will be my 1st quarter sub for WotF most likely), and finish two themed anthology stories that are due by the end of the month. A fairly light load, all things considered.

November is when the real exciting stuff gets going. A story a day. NaShoWriMo. If anyone wants to join me in my insanity, bring it on. I usually write short stories in a day anyway, just not generally consecutively. And I’m pretty sure my typing limit is around 12-13k words in a day (10k is really more my comfort limit, and 3-5k my cruising speed), so at least my stories won’t be crazy long. We can hope.

That’s my plan. In December I’ll collect the notes from my first-readers and try to make my novel outstanding before the queries go out in January. Until then, time to fill up my short story basket. (Just think, I’ll get to 500 rejections much much more quickly if I have 50 stories out than 9…)

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